Raise Your Game
Increasingly, hypnotherapy is used by many people to improve their performance in sports. Applied hypnosis techniques are commonly used by top international golfers as well as within many other individual and team sports, including football, rowing and cricket.
Hypnosis is an effective way of achieving peak perfomance by:
- relaxing and calming, making way for clear thinking
- focusing undivided attention on a chosen goal and intensifying concentration
- creating a clear vision of winning through 'rehearsals' of your best performance
- stimulating mental agility to practise strategies to stay ahead of opponents and pre-empt their moves
- overcoming mental barriers and doubts through the power of positive thinking
There are many other ways that hypnosis and NLP can help in sport improvement. For instance the concept of modelling has been used successfully in golf and other sports. In other words, take a top golfer and model what he or she does both physically and mentally. Anchoring states involves using hypnosis to recall a time of sporting excellence such as winning a race, scoring a goal or playing the perfect round of golf (this can be real or imagined).
At the moment that these feelings of success reach their peak, the emotion is anchored, helping to create what is sometimes known as muscle memory.
Imagery and Mental Rehearsal
It's no secret that sports men and women often incorporate imagery and mental rehearsal into their practice routines. What is less well known is how effective hypnosis can be in this process. When hypnotised you will be able to imagine yourself rehearsing and refining the perfect swing, the perfect goal or running the perfect mile.
Hypnotherapy can profoundly increase our inner belief that success can be ours and, in sport, belief is everything. Which is more surprising? The fact that Roger Bannister ran a sub four minute mile (a feat which the experts said could never be done) or the fact that in the following eighteen months, forty-five other runners did the same.
Get in the Zone
Mental flow involves positive state management. In other words, getting into that championship state more often and just when you need to. It involves being 'in the zone', being engrossed in an event to an almost spiritual level. Have you ever known you were going to score a goal before you even made contact with the ball? Have you ever felt invincible, as if it was your day and nothing could possibly go wrong? This state of performance is sometimes known as a peak experience. Sport psychology often includes techniques such as mental imagery to focus on future achievement.